


Theros: Beyond Death Prologue: Gods and Titans

by TheInvaderZim



Series: Magic Story [1]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Blood & Gore, Canon, Gen, Theros, actual decent writing and storytelling, the story you wish Wizards would write
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:34:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22201132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheInvaderZim/pseuds/TheInvaderZim
Summary: The prologue of new Theros canon - includes stories about the emergence of the two named Titans, the Gods, and the creation of "modern" Theros.
Series: Magic Story [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1598101
Kudos: 2
Collections: Magic Story - Theros: Beyond Death (Unofficial)





	Theros: Beyond Death Prologue: Gods and Titans

**Author's Note:**

> Theros is an ancient plane, with the power of Devotion creating generations of deities, now long-forgotten. Long ago, the Gods were created - but before the gods, there were the Titans - Kroxa, the Titan of Death's Hunger, and Uro, the Titan of Nature's Wrath. This is a story about how legends are born, and about the birth of a cruel, ravenous Death.

_Krok - - - sa…_

The word hissed from the terrified, dying man’s lips. It gave shape to his last breath, which escaped with a strangled, guttural choke.

The man had been old. A gem-studded copper crown and his wizened, sunken face lay helpless, deaf and blind, on silk sheets. The last spark faded from his cobwebbed eyes and he looked blankly at the ceiling of his most secure fortress. His hands, held up to ward off some unseen force, fell limply to his bed. A life’s search in vain, ending in the largest fortress ever built. Helpless against the power of death.

His only son was already old as well. He wept as was appropriate and expected at the bedside of a dead father - before finally taking the long-promised crown for himself. The new king’s youngest grandchildren bawled and wept too, louder, terrified and uncomprehending of what they’d witnessed. The attending physician and the crown’s steward glanced at one another, the king’s final, meaningless word passing from their memories immediately.

But the children continued to cry.

* * *

“Once, long ago,” said the muse to the gathered crowd, “lived a great king with a vast land. He controlled the largest empire in history, and he alone defied our Great Archon…”

The old woman spun her tale well - about a king that had spent his life fruitlessly searching for immortality, to emulate their Great Archon - only to die in terror. The word, Kroxa, was the name he gave to the terrible and cruel fated death which awaited him - the pain, the misery and the howling, sucking, all-consuming terror of the dark abyss. The very same fate, she warned, which awaited _anyone_ who dared to defy their Perfect Master.

In the front of the crowd, a cruel young boy sat in rapt attention. In his hands was his sister’s doll, her most cherished toy, which he eagerly, excitedly twisted and shredded as he learned of the new miseries death was capable of. His father would never hit him again, and receive his just reward. His mother, needling and cold, would finally understand how she’d tortured him. His sister, the screeching, doted-on brat, would finally understand how pointless _she_ was, and how she should’ve worshipped her older brother - as he deserved, as he tried to deserve - when she had the chance.

The doll’s head was parted with its body in a brutal final twist, joining its arms and legs in the dirt. The gypsy finished her tale and held out her hat for coin from the crowd. The boy spat in it, just as his father had instructed was worthy payment for beggars. But the hag’s story rang in his ears.

_“Kroxa…”_ he whispered.

* * *

_Hunger._

That was all the creature was, all It knew, all It remembered. For Its first moment, all It knew was hunger, and that first moment, stretching into another, became an eternity.

For an eternity It had craved, clawed and consumed. It remembered, impossibly, before the first moment, before the first eternity, a nameless king in a nameless fort, whispering to It as It approached to feed. It remembered the desperate struggles of others against It, as old stories sprang into their minds at their last moments. It savored their fear and despair as It rushed towards them. It remembered the screams of a family, offered as a sacrifice to It by name - and those sacrifices had been especially filling.

Then It remembered hundreds of others, only a moment before Its first moment. Each one offered as a morsel to appease It, violently slaughtered in fear and pain - the way It knew that the morsels tasted best.

Then, finally, It remembered a feast - a hundred or more nameless faces, each one tortured and mutilated, each one trickling into its cold maw delectably slowly. It remembered Its own name.

_Kroxa…_

Shadows hissed Its name. Hooded figures standing over bodies trembled and sobbed before kneeling over. Each one another delicious morsel, still insignificant to Its hunger, appeasing It for only a moment.

The shadows salivated and dripped, rancid bile hissing against the stone floor. Then they extended. Bodies were swallowed with wet crunches, and Kroxa hissed in delight as bones broke in Its teeth. Delightful fat, chewy and filled with the flavor of death, slid down Its shadowy throat. Blood moistened parched lips. Muscle tore pleasingly, making death substantial.

A hand - desiccated, starved, grey and rotting - extended from the shadows, reaching for another body still in the light. The body was dragged into darkness on a trail of gore, and ravenously consumed.

Then the shadows emerged. A mighty belch filled the room with noxious gas as It forced Itself into the light for the first time. Eyes - pure, bloody, red - glowed in the darkness before a skull formed to hold them. An enormous, unhinged jaw appeared next, scraps of cloth, skin and gore in its teeth.

The hideous face fell forward onto the final bodies, a pair of arms reemerging to support a starved pair of shoulders and swollen, empty stomach. An enormous tongue snaked from Its mouth to grasp the dead, bragging them back into its maw where it crunched, salivated and wetly swallowed. A hand lifted more bodies to its stomach, where a second maw opened and greedily sucked them in. Then It licked the floor, collecting the last drops of death’s bounty.

That done, something piqued Kroxa’s interest - for the first time in eternity, It was sated, and for the first time in eternity, It noticed something still living.

A man stood in front of It, holding a twisted dagger. He shed his robe to reveal a skinny, naked body covered in scars. Kroxa recognized him - the bringer of the first sacrifices. The human grinned widely, a cruel gleam in his bloodshot eyes.

Kroxa, for the first time, grinned back.

The human lifted the dagger and slashed his arm without hesitation. Blood ran down like a river. He held it to the being, and Kroxa’s tongue extended eagerly to drink. It was hot and fresh - a delicacy unlike anything It had ever tasted.

Kroxa withdrew. The man’s arm had withered and turned greyish green, dead flesh now hanging from the man’s shoulder. But the man felt no pain or fear. Looking up, the crazed creature met Kroxa’s eyes - and with the dagger, slashed his own throat.

Kroxa was upon him like a spider before he’d hit the ground. Fresh blood, It decided, while the creature still lived - that was far preferable. For the first and last time the man, as he entered the maw of the beast, screamed as his lungs filled with blood - finally, in his last moments, afraid of the pain of Death.

\--

Kroxa howled at the night sky. The village was empty. The residents had all fled when He’d been heard, their fear feeding Him… but it wasn’t enough.

The winged riders, so often sent in defense, felt no fear. They felt no pain and no despair as they crunched between His teeth, and they sat empty in His gut until he expelled them. They did nothing to quell His hunger, only filling His stomach like rocks.

The Titan howled again and tore at the ground. An enormous swipe tore trees from the edge of the nearby forest and He shook their limbs into his mouth, to no avail - the first howl had startled the birds.

Hunger gnawed at him. The last village had been nearly 200 strides - so long ago. Far, far too long. In desperation He spat on the Earth, then traced His snaking tongue along the ground - plants felt no terror, remorse, regret or pain, but death was universal. In other corners of the world, He saw Himself descending, invisible, on paupers and kings, on a great city gripped by plague, but the spirits had not been enough - he needed bones, blood and bodies.

Another troupe of winged riders, unnoticed until now, swept down from above the clouds. Spears embedded themselves in the scalp of Death, nothing more than pinpricks, and He swatted the beings aside carelessly. A few He tossed into his stomach-maw, not expecting sustenance, but simply for the satisfaction of crushing the empty vassals between His teeth.

When He spat out the remains, He stood, head touching the sky - humans in hiding were too troublesome to find. Just as he took his first step, flattening a swath of the village, he paused. His beady eyes fixed on the remains of the riders, carelessly discarded. The twisted carcasses had begun to move.

Blank eyes and heads, of rider and beast alike, stared up at Him. He pointed to the forest, and they set off. Minutes later, they began to return. Humans, still alive, still terrified and struggling, were held in their arms.

Kroxa guffawed - a mighty, evil belly-laugh that echoed loudly to the horizon. He laughed and laughed with his belly, long after dawn, while his face devoured the villagers, screaming and brought from the woods.

\--

Kroxa lounged on the mountainside. Below him, a trope of creatures was amassing a pile. The pile was made of humans, of course, and animals - horses, bears, deer, livestock, and more. The strange fish-people of the coast joined them sparingly, along with the centaur half-breeds carried between two or more thralls. Only the cat-men were absent; Kroxa had ordered them slaughtered after they refused to join his following, and refused to be taken alive.

The pile, thrown into a pit of Kroxa’s own making, was growing. A few were dead - and their handlers were scooped into the Titan’s angry maw without delay - but most weren’t. Their legs were broken, sometimes their spines, but Kroxa preferred His food alive and in pain. Only a few at the bottom of the pit were gone, suffocated or crushed under the pile, and a sign that it would soon be time to feed.

Kroxa grinned and strode from the mountainside to the pit in two paces. He felt the fear of His death-worshippers beneath Him. Bull-men, Goat-men, and more humans were gathered, accompanied by demons, shades, undead riders and more of his own twisted creations. The living hoped, foolishly, to spare themselves - to serve as slaves and survive by feeding others to His insatiable hunger. 

But the area was almost stripped, He knew - soon he would consume his followers, once nothing else was left, just as he had before, and just as he would soon do again. A chosen few, the most loyal, would be converted to his more permanent ranks. 

A smattering of the humans joined the pile themselves, just as Kroxa descended onto it - the terror of continuing to live finally outpacing the fear of His death. The rest watched, silently, as he raised the first handful of screaming victims to his mouth, and began to feed.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are appreciated regarding character context (if I got a character 'wrong') and plane lore (if I missed some kind of detail). I strive to create well-edited work, and will correct spelling errors or unintended grammar mishaps if they're pointed out.
> 
> The next chapter will be the origin of Uro, the Titan of Nature's Wrath.


End file.
